Before
the mid-eighteen hundreds, common belief was that those who suffered
from mental illness suffered because they had a "disease of the soul".
Their madness supposedly stemmed from an evil within, and they thus were
treated as animals. Patients in these early asylums were kept in cages,
given small amounts of often unclean food, had little or no clothing,
wore no shoes, and slept in dirt.

Most facilities never provided enough care for all the patients

So sad..

Shock therapy

Bellevue Hospital in New York, criminal ward, ca 1890

Asylum Hospital 1915

In Sierra Leone Psychiatric Hospital in West Africa, many patients were chained to their bed or a pillar in the room.

Jane Bielawski and her doll 'Missy'.
Following the suspicious deaths of some of her playmates in a New York
tenement, police attempted to interview Jane. According to reports, the
young girl went 'crazy' and accused her doll of the murders, before
throwing the doll out of her apartment window while screaming, "Bad
dolly! Naughty dolly!" Jane was taken to Bloomingdale Asylum to be
treated for 'hysteria'. She was never to leave the institution, dying
there an old woman in 1968.

Patients were often strapped to a Tranquilizer Chair for as long as six months.

This
poster was commissioned by the English Eugenics Education Society... by
1914 it had over 1,000 members. It aimed to promote public awareness of
eugenic problems, advocating the ‘improvement’ of human hereditary
traits through social intervention.

Prior
to the 1850′s in New England, insane people, like this woman from
Danvers Massachusetts were auctioned off to the highest bidder to do
with as they pleased

Isolated in an insane asylum

Lobotomy

LIFE Magazine - Byberry 1946 article Patients have no clothes, and wander around naked and filthy

One patient kills another

Patients and nurses

The
Ridges Asylum in Ohio. A 54-year-old female patient ran away and was
missing for six weeks. She was found dead in an unused ward. She had
taken off all her clothes, neatly folded them, and laid down on the cold
concrete where she subsequently died. Through a combination of
decomposition and sun exposure, her corpse left a permanent stain on the
floor, which is still visible today.

Philadelphia State Hospital

Insane asylum, Kabul, Afghanistan

Dentist office in an abandoned children's insane asylum

Padded room in abandoned insane asylum

Kings
park mental hospital graveyard. Most times patients that died were
collected and put in a mass burial. On the few occasions they had their
own grave, it was marked by a number, not their name.